An American Woman’s Listening Tour Through the Axis of Evil

“I brought clothing, but I left my violin, left my typewriter, left my Shirley Temple collection, left my cat,” said Carol Hironaka, 82, who was interned at Manzanar when she was 17, describing what she packed into her allotted 2 suitcases with only a week’s notice. “I had no idea how long I’d be here.”
She would be at Manzanar for 3 years. No high school prom. No walking across the stage to collect that diploma. No nights out with friends in the streets of Florin, a small town near Sacramento.

“The government made us sell our house at a very chickeny price. They eventually tore down our beautiful Victorian home. So we had nothing to go home to,” Hironaka shrugged. “We went to the Florin Japanese hostel and stayed there through the winter.”

A large, grainy, black-and-white photo of 4 side-by-side toilets adorns the US National Park Service’s women’s bathroom at the Manzanar Historical Site (www.nps.gov/manz). Located near mockingly named Independence, California, the concentration camp held 10,046 American Japanese during WWII.

The 1944 photo of the Men’s Latrine at Block 40 is an embarrassing reminder of the humiliating conditions Japanese Americans endured during the weeks, months and years following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. The following February, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order #9066, requiring all Americans of Japanese ancestry to be “evacuated” from newly created “exclusion zones” along the West coast. His Administration referred to the places they would be evacuated to as concentration camps.

It took the US military just 6 weeks to slap together 504 barracks at the barren foot of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in mainland America, creating one of the lowest points in America’s history.(more…)